Computing Student Employability Skills Through STEM Outreach

Enhancing Computing Student Employability Skills Through Partnership Working in STEM Outreach - Springer:


Scott Turner
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-29166-6_10


Published in Software Engineering Education Going Agile Part of the series Progress in IS pp 67-71

Abstract

Student volunteering is growing in the UK and elsewhere, and there is an ongoing debate about whether it is really “self-evidently a ‘good thing’” or there is a greater need for reflection to determine whether this statement is true (Holdsworth and Quinn, Studies in Higher Education, 35(1), 113–127, 2010). This paper presents a personal reflection of Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) volunteering as a potential route to increasing Computing student’s employability.

References

1.

STEMNet (2015) Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Network [online] Available at: http://​www.​stemnet.​org.​uk/​ Accessed on: 24thJanuary 2015

2.

Sinclair J, Allen A, Davis L, Goodchild T, Messenger J, Turner S (2014) "Enhancing student employability skills through partnership working in STEM outreach; the University of Northampton approach " HEA STEM Annual Teaching and Learning Conference 2013: Enhancing the STEM Student Journey, University of Edinburgh, 30th April-1st May 2014

3.

Holdsworth, C., & Quinn, J. (2010). Student volunteering in English higher education. Studies in Higher Education, 35(1), 113–127.CrossRef

4.

Brewis, G., Russell, J., & Holdsworth, C. (2010). Bursting the bubble: Students, volunteering and the community. Research Summary.

5.

Junkbots (2015) Junkbots [online] Available at: http://​junkbots.​blogspot.​co.​uk/​ Accessed on: 24th January 2015.

'via Blog this'

Posting on the site does not imply endorsement in any way, by the blog owner or any organisations the blog owner is associated with.

Rating for Serious Games

A Rating Tool for Sharing Experiences with Serious Games 

M. Hendrix, P. Backlund, B. Vampula, 

International Journal of Game-Based Learning (IJGBL), 

volume 4(4), pp. 1-18, 2014.

DOI: 10.4018/ijgbl.2014100101

Abstract:

The potential of Computer Games for non-entertainment purposes, such as education, is well established. A wide variety of games have been developed for the educational market, covering subjects such as mathematics and languages. However, while a growing industry developing educational games exist, the practical uptake in schools is not as high as one would expect, based on current evidence of their effectiveness. The EduGameLab project investigates causes and solutions to the relatively low level of uptake in European schools. This paper describes a rating tool for sharing experiences about educational games among educators and parents, developed in the EduGameLab project. The ambition is that sharing knowledge about how games can be used in practice will stimulate practical use and acceptance. The development of this tool is based on a metadata schema for formally describing serious games and experiences with these games.

DOI: 10.4018/ijgbl.2014100101

Sample of the paper: http://www.igi-global.com/viewtitlesample.aspx?id=121791&ptid=91477&t=A%20Rating%20Tool%20for%20Sharing%20Experiences%20with%20Serious%20Games

If you'd like to find out more about Computing at the University of Northampton go to: www.computing.northampton.ac.uk. All views and opinions are the author's and do not necessarily reflected those of any organisation they are associated with

Creative Computational Thinking blog

A new blog has been launched by Scott Turner  looking at Computational Thinking (http://compuationalthinking.blogspot.co.uk/ - the typo in the name is there on purpose). As a blog there is not a particular target audience apart from those interested in Computational Thinking or problem-solving.

At the time of writing so far there have been posts on robots, apps, and overview of Computational Thinking.


If you'd like to find out more about Computing at the University of Northampton go to: www.computing.northampton.ac.uk. All views and opinions are the author's and do not necessarily reflected those of any organisation they are associated with.

11th China – Europe International Symposium on Software Industry Orientated Education

11th China – Europe International Symposium on  Software Industry Orientated Education:

29-30th April 2015, 

Westsächsische Hochschule Zwickau, 

University of Applied Science

For more details go to:http://whz-cms-10.zw.fh-zwickau.de/bo/index_CEISEE.html

Paper extended deadline: 31st January 2015

Call for papers



If you'd like to find out more about Computing at the University of Northampton go to: www.computing.northampton.ac.uk. All views and opinions are the author's and do not necessarily reflected those of any organisation they are associated with

primary robot design questionnaire

An undergraduate dissertation student is looking for help. James is a computing student looking at robot designs for primary education towards his dissertation and as part of the wider Junkbots project, and the working going on in both the Department of Computing and Immersive Technologies, and School of Education on Physical Computing at the University of Northampton.

The short questionnaire can be found at http://t.co/zdomXnW2Qe and is aimed at gathering a variety of responses from both current Teachers, Students of Education and from anyone with knowledge of programming teaching methods in both Key Stage 1 and 2. He is planning to create a product which aims to teach programming methods and practices based on the current and new national curriculum.


If you'd like to find out more about Computing at the University of Northampton go to: www.computing.northampton.ac.uk. All views and opinions are the author's and do not necessarily reflected those of any organisation they are associated with.

Chatbot: an innovative learning and teaching.

Chatbot: an innovative approach towards learning and teaching process in today’s education system.

Poonam Bhatia

Abstract
Artificial intelligence has been appreciated for bringing the ease to human’s life in the form of intelligent agents. These are software that can that can perform task on behalf of users that can range from solving problems to learning new things to making recommendations in various situations. One particular type of agent known as chatbot, offers an attractive ways to communicate with humans behaving as if it understands the human language. Chat bots have been widely used in many industries like entertainment, health, banking to help users but its potential has not been fully utilised in education sector where they can be used as a leaning model by students during their academic year. The task of examining the hypothesis ‘Chat bot can be an innovative approach towards learning and teaching process in today’s education system’ is the main purpose of this dissertation.

As an initiation point, sufficient amount of literature sources were researched to understand the application areas of chat bots along with their effects. The overall efficiency of a chat bot as a mentor was tested through the development of a prototype system. For system evaluation, the framework of the system was based on JAVA concepts where system acts as a JAVA tutor with a view to teach JAVA concepts to students.

The system was tested by using a sample of potential computing students of University of Northampton and the feedback was extracted from the questionnaire that distributed to the participants. It then helped to know user’s point of view on having chat bots as a tool for learning their courses.
This investigation thus, helped in understanding the potential of chat bots as tutors in colleges and universities. They give a new direction to the existing learning and teaching process by its automating various tasks and providing availability 24X7 for guidance which is not possible in today’s pedagogical system.

The University of Northampton's, Department of Computing and Immersive Technologies offers five courses within the MSc Computing postgraduate provision (shown below) all available either part-time or full-time. 

• MSc Computing
• MSc Computing (Internet Technology and Security)
• MSc Computing (Computer Networks Engineering)
• MSc Computing (Software Engineering)
• MSc Computing (Immersive Technologies)

9th China-Europe International Symposium on Software Engineering Education, Milan

Two members of the Computing TeamGary Hill and Scott Turner on 12-14th May 2013 presented a paper Electronic Online Marking Of Software Assignments (EOMOSA) in Milan at 9th China-Europe International Symposium on Software Engineering Education. (which two years ago was held in Northampton). 

This conference series brings Universities in Europe together with some of the top universities in China, in the field of software engineering, to discuss industrial orientation software education.

As well as presenting, members of the School of Science and Technology continue on the programme committee including chairing one of the sessions. 


Related posts

• China and Europe coming to Milan
• CEISEE 2012 - Shanghai
• International Conference comes to Northampton
• Robots and Graphical Programming: Xi'an China

teaching and learning in computing journal papers

Kariyawasam K., A., Turner S., Hill G. (2012) "Is it Visual? The importance of a Problem Solving Module within a Computing course", Computer Education, Volume 10, Issue 166, May 2012, pp. 5-7, ISSN: 1672-5913.


Summary slides shown below

Shanghai visual is_it

View more PowerPoint from Scott Turner

Hill G., Turner S. (2012) "Referencing within Code in Software Engineering Education!", Computer Education, Volume 10, Issue 166, May 2012, pp. 1-4, ISSN: 1672-5913.

Abstract: Traditionally computer sciences courses will assess software code. It is common and accepted good practice (as in written reports) to reference other sources of appropriate material. However there appears to be no explicit method, recommendation or advice to computer science tutors and students on a referencing approach. This paper aims to stimulate discussion from peers involved in software engineering education. By discussing the apparent lack of "referencing within code" advice to students and proposing suggestions for appropriate solutions.




If there are others recently in the school on teaching and learning please send me the details: scott.turner@northampton.ac.uk

Artificial Intelligence- system optimization and education

The application of Artificial Intelligence techniques in system optimization and engineering education 

 Dr Rosa Basagoiti 

University of Mondragon, 

Spain 

 Date: Thursday 28th June 2012 

Time: 14:00 – 15:00 

 Venue: MY120, Avenue Campus  

SYNOPSIS  

This lecture will discuss various methods of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that can be applied in three different technical areas.  The first area involves lift engineering / vertical transportation where genetic algorithms can be used to solve the dispatching problem. This optimization problem can be considered as a Multiple Travelling Salesman Problem (MTSP) and can be treated with genetic algorithm techniques. Using these techniques, two different objectives can be pursued: time and energy consumption. Furthermore, fuzzy logic methods can help to decide automatically when to prioritize the time and when to prioritize the energy consumption.  

The second area is the system monitoring and diagnosis where feature extraction and classification can be used in a data-driven approximation approach combined with physical models.  In the third application, the personalization of content of e-learning platforms for students learning profiles is involved. In this problem one needs to create models of the students’ activity and use them in order to improve the student effectiveness and engagement, reducing the time used by the tutor to select content specific for each student.

opinion: easy as Pi!

Reblogged from: http://blogs.northampton.ac.uk/expertsatnorthampton/2012/03/09/easy-as-pi/

There has recently been quite a lot of excitement about the Raspberry Pi, and rightly so. At around £25 for a computer (you need to have a keyboard and TV) it has lots of features that make it interesting.

For me though its most interesting feature is it is a no-frills device that doesn’t look like the black box in the corner – it’s a circuit board with some chips and connections. Why is that interesting? Well, that’s what a computer essentially is.  It is cheap enough that if it breaks it is not a serious problem, and in most cases people are unlikely to write something that will break the machine anyway.

There has, quite rightly, been a lot of excitement – because of the price, and for encouraging school children to learn to program. I agree with this whole-heartedly, but there is potentially a more interesting feature, what else can you do with it? Yes, you can word process, run video or connect to the internet, but what if you connected it to something else?  What if you combined them together or connect cameras to them – what could you produce at a relatively low cost?

A low cost device that can be used to encourage ideas to be played with, where it doesn’t matter too much if it goes wrong –  that is where the excitement should be. I do not know what is going to come out of it, but I am very interested to find out.

What do you think?

CEISE2011 paper: Software Industry and Talents Cultivation in China

An abstract from the 7th China – Europe International Symposium on Software Industry Orientated Education to be held 23-24th May 2011 at School of Science and Technology, University of Northampton, UK. For more details can be found at this link.

Software Industry and Talents Cultivation in China

Chen Dongming, Zhu Zhiliang

Software College of Northeastern University, China

Abstract

As the backbone and representative of the present high-tech industry, the information industry serves as the strategic pillar industry of China in this century. By analyzing the present state, characteristics, and development routes of China's software industry, this study will find out the problem and then provide solutions to China’s IT industry, especially the software industry. Education and training for software talents cultivation will also be talked about here.

Proceedings can be found at: http://www.web-sustainablity.net/conference/GreenConferenceBook.pdf

Book chapter: Problems First

Two members of the Computing Division of the University of Northampton have contributed a chapter to the book  Software Industry-Oriented Education Practices and Curriculum Development: Experiences and Lessons  edited by Drs. Matthew Hussey, Xiaofei Xu and Bing Wu.  ISBN: 978-1609607975 IGI Global to be published later this year.

Problems First

Gary Hill and Scott Turner

ABSTRACT

This chapter considers the need to focus initial programming education on problem-solving, in advance of programming syntax and software design methodology. The main vehicle for this approach is simple Lego based robots programmed in Java, followed by the programming of a graphical representation/simulation to develop programming skills. Problem solving is not trivial (Beaumont & Fox, 2003) and is an important skill, central to computing and engineering.

An approach will be considered, illustrated with a series of problem-solving tasks that increase in complexity at each stage and give the students practice in attempting problem-solving approaches, as well as assisting them to learn from their mistakes. Some of the problems include ambiguities or are purposely ill-defined, to enable the student to resolve these as part of the process.

The benefits to students will be discussed including students’ statements that this approach, using robots, provides a method to visually and physically see the outcome of a problem. In addition, students report that the method improves their satisfaction with the course.

The importance of linking the problem-solving robot activity and the programming assignment, whilst maintaining the visual nature of the problem, will be discussed, together with the comparison of this work with similar work reported by other authors relating to teaching programming using robots (Williams, 2003). 

Robots and Graphical Programming: Xi'an China

Two members of the computing division recently presented a paper "Innovative use of Robots and Graphical Programming in Software Education " at  6th China Europe International Symposium on Software Industry Oriented Education (CEISIE2010) Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an China.


Problem solving is an important skill for a computer scientist. Mindstorm based robots have been used previously, for teaching programming to computing and engineering students here we look at problem solving. These approaches focus upon the development of problem solving skills and not on learning a new programming language from the outset. Therefore, initially, any programming is kept simple with the minimum of commands, with „objects‟ unknowingly used, as these are later introduced/learnt during the programming stage of the computing module. This work suggests that using LEGO robots within the teaching of problem solving and the resulting java GUI emulation has some benefits for the students when learning to program. 


More details can be found in the following article :
Turner S and Hill G (2010) "Innovative use of Robots and Graphical Programming in Software Education" Computer Education Ser. 117 No. 9 pp 54-57 ISSN: 1672-5913